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Researching TikTok: Themes, Methods, and Future Directions

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Miltsov, A. (2022). “Researching TikTok: Themes, methods, and future directions.” Pp. 664-
676 in The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods, 2nd Edition, edited by A.
Quan-Haase, and L. Sloan. SAGE. https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781529782943.n46

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Researching TikTok: Themes, Methods, and Future Directions

Alex Miltsov

Abstract

TikTok, a short video-sharing social media platform, has quickly become one of the most
popular apps. The platform offers a highly immersive and interactive environment, where
users share original content and participate in challenges, duets, and other tasks. Even though
TikTok is only a few years old, it has already been shaping the ways millions of people
interact online and engage in artistic, cultural, social, and political activities. This chapter
provides a comprehensive overview of emerging TikTok studies. It shows that there is a
growing interest in studying TikTok and its social effects. Social scientists have applied a
wide range of methodological approaches to explore users' experiences on TikTok and the
platform’s effects on society. This chapter discusses the most effective research strategies in
TikTok studies, examines specific cases of several research projects, and suggests directions
for future research.

1. Introduction
Launched in 2017, the video-sharing social network TikTok, quickly became one of the most
popular social media platforms in the world. It attracts a predominantly young audience who
use the app to create, share, and view short videos. The app contains many features common
among different social media platforms, such as user profiles, comments, and “likes” (see
also Miltsov (2017)). At the same time, there are several distinct features and affordances,
such as the emphasis on brevity, improvisation, and collaboration; the platform’s algorithm
that tailors content recommendations according to users’ preferences; and short playful
videos as content. Together, these features create a unique digital media environment.

The objective of this chapter is to explore how TikTok can be used for social scientific
research. To accomplish this, this chapter provides a brief overview of the platform and
answers three interlinked questions: 1) What are the main themes in the current TikTok
scholarship? 2) What are the most effective research methods currently used by TikTok
researchers? Finally, 3) What are the most promising directions in future TikTok studies? In
this way, this article contributes to digital media studies with a systematic analysis of how
TikTok is currently used in exploring a broad range of social issues and demonstrates in
practical terms the potential of the platform for anyone interested in digital media research.

PREPRINT: Alex Miltsov Researching TikTok: Themes, Methods, and Future Directions 1
2. Overview of the platform

In 2016, a Beijing-based company, ByteDance, launched a short-video app called Douyin for
a domestic audience in China. In 2017, the company launched TikTok as an international
version of Douyin. ByteDance has maintained both versions of the app since then (Abidin,
2021). ByteDance then acquired the lip-syncing app Musical.ly, which was popular with
teens at the time, and subsequently merged it with Douyin and TikTok. Since its launch,
TikTok has enjoyed explosive growth, and it was the second most downloaded app in the
world in 2019 (Medina Serrano et al., 2020).

The main feature of the platform is the ability to upload, view, and share short 15-second
videos. These 15-second videos can be put together sequentially to create a longer video of a
maximum of 60 seconds. Many social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and
Instagram, offer a “feed” or a continuous flow of textual or visual content to a user. TikTok,
in contrast, shows one video at a time that users can swipe up to see the next video or swipe
down to return to the previous video they have watched. The platform provides several
typical social media features, such as a user profile, the ability to “follow” other accounts and
to post comments and “likes” (Anderson, 2020). At the same time, TikTok offers several
distinct features that shape users’ experiences and interactions making TikTok a unique
digital media environment compared to other social media companies. Here, I will briefly
discuss three specific features of the platform:

2.1 Recommendation algorithm

TikTok’s recommendation algorithm studies the user’s past activities and adapts to changes
in user preferences and engagement patterns. It also tracks popular content to offer an endless
supply of videos for each user. These videos appear sequentially on the “For you” page. Each
“For you” page is individually tailored to the user’s preferences, past engagement, location,
and other characteristics. Given the centrality of the “For you” function, it is safe to say that
the app’s recommendation algorithm is a major force that shapes users’ experiences,
engagements, and interactions on the platform (Vázquez-Herrero et al., 2021).

2.2 Editing features

TikTok includes several editing features, such as overlays, stickers, textual elements,
transitions, and visual effects (Vázquez-Herrero et al., 2020). This allows editing “raw” video
recordings directly on the platform to create short videos enhanced by effective textual
elements. In addition, the platform allows the incorporation of short audio clips and audio
effects into existing visual content. In particular, the lip-synching app is a popular feature that
allows users to pair original visual content with a short excerpt from a song (Vijay & Gekker,
2021). This way, TikTokers can synchronize their singing and/or dancing with some popular
song or melody. The resulting videos oftentimes contain a mix of different media: audio,
visual, and textual elements. This also means that TikTok offers a digital environment where
effective short videos can be created in situ without using “third-party” tools. This, in turn,
ensures users’ engagement and activity on the platform.

2.3 Enhanced engagement

In addition to “likes” and “comments”, the platform offers several additional ways for how
users can engage with content. For instance, users can respond to a video with a video of their
own. They can also remix another user’s video to create their own visual content.

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Alternatively, they can participate in duets that allow for creating a coordinated performance,
where two or more users perform that same dance routine, song, or some other activity. This
feature has particularly contributed to the app’s popularity as many users use duets to perform
alongside popular personalities on TikTok (Anderson, 2020).

The combination of these features has created a highly immersive environment, where users
are incentivized to spend long hours on the platform watching and interacting with a
seemingly endless stream of video content. In this respect, a number of media commentators
have raised the alarm that the app is highly addictive and its use needs to be curbed (Koetsier,
2020; Matei, 2020).

The above-mentioned features have also created the illusion that virtually any video has the
potential of becoming popular. The emphasis on immersiveness and virality seems to be at
the core of the company’s tactic to foster and maintain users’ engagement (Vijay & Gekker,
2021). Together, these elements create a digital environment that simultaneously resembles
well-established social media sites, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat, and
provides a qualitatively new social media experience to millions of people around the world.

In the next two sections, I will discuss why and how social scientists study this digital
environment and its social effects.

3. Major themes in current research

The platform’s unprecedented popularity among young audiences and its increasing impact
on how millions of people around the world create, share, and consume digital content offers
a fertile research site. Given the platform’s young age, emergent social scientific scholarship
on TikTok consists of a limited but quickly growing number of empirical studies on a wide
range of topics. Thematically, there are three overlapping themes in social scientific
scholarship on TikTok: 1) Studies of young people’s attitudes and experiences; 2) Cross-
platform studies; 3) Research on platform affordances and their effects.

3.1 Studies of young people’s attitudes and experiences

TikTok enjoys a considerable following among young people. More importantly, it

increasingly shapes and directs the development of youth culture. Given the centrality of the
platform for millions of young people around the world, social scientists have increasingly
used TikTok to study the youth’s cultural, social, and political attitudes and experiences. For
instance, education researcher William Terrell Wright (2021) looked at several popular
school-related hashtags to understand how students speak out against institutional dynamics
and discourses. The results of the study show that in the age of digitally mediated socializing,
TikTok is rapidly becoming an important backchannel for adolescents that not only helps
them express ideas and thoughts about schooling but also influences their identity formation.

In another project, Internet researcher Ioana Literat (2021) used the platform to study how
young people experience online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. By assembling
close to 2000 short videos related to the #onlineschool hashtag, Literat was able to
understand the different challenges and anxieties that students experienced in online classes.

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This study is a good example of how the platform can provide an unfiltered perspective on
how young people cope with challenging situations.

In a separate study, Literat and colleagues (2021) analyzed users’ responses to TikTok’s
media literacy campaign. The goal of the study was to understand how a predominantly
young audience views and engages with online campaigns that specifically target the youth.
When discussing their choice to use the platform as their site of data collection, the
researchers argued that the limitations of conventional methods in studying young people’s
attitudes reside in that interviews and surveys are likely to produce biased results due to
social desirability factors. However, the collection of user responses to media literacy
initiatives directly on the TikTok platform “facilitates a naturalistic study of young people’s
attitudes towards such initiatives in situ, “in the wild” (Literat et al., 2021, p. 7).

These examples showcase new opportunities that TikTok offers to researchers engaged in
youth and adolescent studies. For instance, research on the platform can help address several
well-known ethical and methodological issues in the field of youth studies, such as the
unequal power dynamics between adult researchers and adolescent respondents, the difficulty
of adequately studying sensitive topics or the potential misrepresentation of the youth and
their views, and non-response bias (Cieslik, 2003). Conducting unobtrusive research on
TikTok may help researchers to capture unfiltered and unbiased views and experiences of
young people. However, one should keep in mind that this type of research, in turn, raises a
host of new methodological questions, such as sample generalizability, the effects of the
platform’s dynamics on individual expressions, the degree to which the researcher’s
familiarity with the platform affects the various stages of the project, among other questions.

3.2 Cross-platform studies

Another cluster of studies used a cross-platform approach combining TikTok with other
popular social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and/or YouTube to explore a
broad range of social and cultural effects of social media use.

In some cases, researchers examined the same question or pattern across different platforms
(Al-Maroof et al., 2021; Eghtesadi, 2020; Haenlein et al., 2020; Literat & Kligler-Vilenchik,
2021; Masciantonio et al., 2021). In these studies, TikTok presented a data collection site
and, in some cases, the platform was treated as an independent variable in the analysis. For
instance, Literat & Kligler-Vilenchik (2021) used a cross-platform approach to study how
young people expressed political opinions online. Specifically, they utilized a mixed-methods
strategy to examine how users engaged with the topic of the building of the US-Mexico
border wall in the Fortnite videogame across Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. This study
not only demonstrated how young people expressed social and political attitudes on the
platform but also revealed how the structures of social media environments shape the youth’s
political expressions.

In other cases, researchers compared TikTok with other social media sites, sometimes with
Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, to understand to what extent different platform
affordances create different user experiences and social outcomes (Kaye et al., 2021; Lin,
2020; Neyaz, 2020). Here, D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye and colleagues’ study (2021) is an
excellent illustration of this type of comparative research. The researchers employed the app
walkthrough method (see Light et al., 2018) and systematically compared the main features
of Douyin and TikTok conducting a socio-political analysis of how these sites developed

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over time. Their results show how two virtually indistinguishable platforms, created by the
same company, operate in two rather different socio-political and economic contexts. As a
result, Kaye and colleagues (2021) coined the concept of parallel platformization, which
“refers to practices of platforms that are developed by the same entity, offer nearly the same
features, but differ in their infrastructures, governance, and market” (p. 245). This study may
be useful in approaching similar cases in the future as digital media companies develop
multiple versions of the same app for different international markets and audiences.

However, comparative cross-platform studies that include TikTok are currently an

underdeveloped area of research. Future studies may look at the ways different platform
affordances lead to diverse social, cultural, and political outcomes. For example, a project
that traces how the same environmental organization, such as the Sea Shepherd Conservation
Society operates across different platforms may reveal interesting insights not only about the
ways contemporary social movement organizations utilize digital media but also to what
extent TikTok may present a unique social media environment for organizations and groups.

3.3 Research on platform affordances and their effects

Finally, several studies looked at how the combination of several distinct features makes
TikTok a unique social media platform. They explored how such features as the centrality of
music in content creation, the emphasis on short videos, the mixture of different artistic
styles, and the virality of digital content, create a particular user experience. In these studies,
researchers examined a variety of psychological, social, cultural, and political effects of this
experience (Kennedy, 2020; Medina Serrano et al., 2020; Omar & Dequan, 2020; Su et al.,
2020; Vázquez-Herrero et al., 2020; Verma, 2021; Wang, 2020).

In one study, a group of researchers explored how athletes used the platform as a branding
and communication tool during the COVID-19 pandemic (Su et al., 2020). They found that
the platform’s affordances, such as the powerful video editor and the emphasis on creativity
and spontaneity, allowed athletes to create playful, engaging, and relatable content.
Specifically, they argued that “the distinct characteristics of TikTok, such as easy-to-apply
memes and the algorithm that promotes grassroots content, are uniquely suited to the creation
of viral content, which moves this video-sharing app beyond a bite-size version of YouTube
or a permanent version of Instagram stories” (Su et al., 2020, p. 444). These findings are
relevant to anyone interested in examining the distinct affordances of TikTok when it comes
to marketing, branding, and their social and economic effects. Their results suggest that the
platform currently occupies a distinct position in offering highly relatable, playful, and
engaging content that can be easily shared, remixed, and reimagined by users.

In another study, digital anthropologist Chrystal Abidin (2021) conducted comprehensive

research on how the rise of TikTok has affected the ways Internet celebrities communicated
with their audiences. Abidin argues that TikTok has introduced major changes in how
influencers present themselves in the digital public space. Unlike Instagram, Snapchat, and
other social media platforms that prioritize visual representation over text, TikTok, with its
focus on music and audio effects, has created a novel digital environment where sound
dominates over images (Abidin, 2021, pp. 79–80). This new environment, in turn, affects all
aspects of presentation and communication on the platform and beyond. Similar to Su et al.
(2020), Abidin (2021) argues that Tiktok’s novel affordances facilitate the creation of
informal, relatable, and playful content: “the ‘staging’ of an ‘Instagrammable’ lifestyle that
was aspirational and pristine, seemed to give way to the ‘crafting’ of a relatable performance

PREPRINT: Alex Miltsov Researching TikTok: Themes, Methods, and Future Directions 5
that was entertaining and accessible” (p.83). The results further reinforce the idea that TikTok
should be treated as a substantially different digital environment compared to the dominant
social media platforms of the 2010s.

In sum, these examples show that TikTok is a relatively unexplored yet important platform
for any researcher interested in examining the social effects of digital media use. With its
unique set of affordances, TikTok has already created a distinct digital experience for
millions of people around the world. More importantly, as the platform grows in popularity, it
changes the ways people communicate, entertain themselves, create art, conduct business, or
engage in political actions both online and offline (Medina Serrano et al., 2020; Vázquez-
Herrero et al., 2021; Wang, 2020). Therefore, I would argue that the study of how specific
platform affordances create tangible social effects is one of the most fruitful research
directions for a wide range of social scientists.

4. Methods

Currently, the platform does not provide an official Application Programming Interface (API)
that can be used for examining individual users’ activities and/or for data collection purposes
(Guinaudeau et al., 2021, p. 10). In addition, at the present moment, there are no research
instruments designed specifically for the study of TikTok. This may have to do with the
platform’s young age. This may also be related to the fact that the company’s policy
explicitly prohibits any adaptation and modification of the “algorithms, methods, or
techniques embodied in TikTok” and the use of “automated scripts to collect information
from TikTok” (TikTok, 2020). Instead, researchers rely on the “traditional” toolkit for social
scientific research, which includes qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches
(Creswell & Creswell, 2017).

Obtrusive methods, such as interviews and surveys, may be problematic when applied to the
predominantly young audience of the platform due to non-response and social desirability
biases (Cieslik, 2003). Therefore, this section focuses primarily on unobtrusive research
methods (Kellehear, 2020). Specifically, I will discuss the three most effective research
strategies in existing TikTok scholarship: 1) Case studies; 2) Content analysis; 3) Mixed
methods studies.

4.1 Case studies

Several researchers have used the case studies approach (see Crowe et al., 2011; Feagin et al.,
1991) to conduct in-depth analyses of how users, groups, and organizations engage with the
platform. These researchers examined various social, political, and cultural ramifications of
these engagements (Bandy & Diakopoulos, 2020; Herrick et al., 2021; Kaye, 2020; Kennedy,
2020).

Several studies have focused on specific individuals who embody certain larger platform
trends (Kaye, 2020; Kennedy, 2020). For example, Kaye (2020) discussed the case of Sophie
Fraser, a young Australian songwriter and vocalist, whose accidentally recorded street
performance went viral on the platform and made Fraser popular. By focusing on this case,
this study shows how TikTok, with its emphasis on virality, is changing both the individual
artists’ careers and the music industry as a whole.

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In another explorative study, communication scholar Melanie Kennedy (2020) examined the
channel of Charli D’Amelio, the most followed user on TikTok as of July 2021 (Wikipedia,
2021), to understand how the representations of femininity and celebrity are communicated
through the platform. Specifically, the author argues that the “so-called silly, unashamed and
unfiltered girlhood on TikTok, which is epitomised in a figure like D’Amelio is highly
constructed, and its characteristics restricted to a narrow set of gendered, racialised, classed
and sexualised” (Kennedy, 2020, p. 1072). Thus, by exploring the most popular individual
account on TikTok, Kennedy is able to reveal how the idea of girlhood continues to be
dominated by whiteness, class privilege, and conventional femininity on the platform.

In addition, the case study approach is helpful when studying a particular event or user
activity. Oftentimes, researchers examine a specific hashtag to trace the ways social, cultural,
and political discussions and actions unfold on the platform (Bandy & Diakopoulos, 2020;
Herrick et al., 2021; Vijay & Gekker, 2021). In their study of political communication, Jack
Bandy & Nicholas Diakopoulos (2020) focused on a particular case – namely, the ways
TikTok users organized to counteract Donald J. Trump’s re-election rally in Tulsa,
Oklahoma. In 2019, #TulsaFlop became a popular hashtag that users utilized as a uniting
element for their political campaign. After analyzing a sample of videos posted under this
hashtag, the researchers were able to obtain valuable insights into how TikTok’s algorithm is
used for collective action. Specifically, Bandy & Diakopoulos, (2020) note that “user-driven
amplification, as evidenced in our analyses, is an important democratic aspect of TikTok
which allows anyone the chance to "go viral" (p. 5). But, at the same time, “users have
limited control over what becomes visible on the platform, and visibility is highly skewed –
the top 1% of videos in our dataset accounted for 76% of all plays” (p. 5). This study
exemplifies how the case study approach may reveal important aspects of the ways the
platform operates and how TikTok’s algorithmic practices structure social interactions on and
beyond the platform.

Unfortunately, the case study approach is currently underused in the TikTok scholarship.
Nevertheless, it has great potential for research in a wide range of disciplines, such as
communication studies, cultural studies, sociology, political science, and others as this
method allows for a detailed analysis of the ways TikTok is rapidly changing artistic,
communicative, social, political, and business practices. In addition, by zooming in on a
specific case or by comparing different cases, researchers can explore the inner workings of
TikTok’s algorithm and its social effects.

4.2 Content analysis

At present, content analysis is by far the most utilized research methodology in TikTok
scholarship (Ammar et al., 2020; Literat, 2021; Literat & Kligler-Vilenchik, 2021; Vázquez-
Herrero et al., 2021; Weimann & Masri, 2020; Carson, 2021; Herrick et al., 2021; Li et al.,
2021). For instance, this approach helps understand political communication on the platform.
Lujain Ammar and colleagues (2020) carried out a qualitative content analysis to understand
how users discussed the 2019 Lebanese protests. The researchers discovered that users
employed humour and satire to express their political opinions online. In a different study,
Gabriel Weimann & Natalie Masri (2020) conducted a content analysis of how far-right
individuals and groups spread their propaganda on TikTok. This study shows that even
though the company prohibits the posting of any discriminatory content, there are multiple
cases of far-right extremism on the platform.

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A particularly insightful illustration of the strength of content analysis in TikTok studies is
Jorge Vázquez-Herrero and colleagues’ (2021) study of how mass media channels use the
platform. The researchers worked with a sample of 19 news media companies with official
accounts on TikTok and analyzed both the content posted by the companies and the ways
these organizations utilized different features, such as hashtags, challenges, video editing,
sound tagging, and so on. Their results show that news media organizations use all the tools
available to them on TikTok to disseminate and promote their videos and, by doing so, they
adapt to the logic of the platform. This adaptation, in turn, significantly changes the structure,
the style, and the very content of their message. In a way, these conclusions echo the famous
McLuhanian assertion that “the medium is the message” (McLuhan, 1994). Moreover, the
researchers have shown that this adaptation leads to a new arrangement of power between
news media, audience, and the platform, where individual users have a choice to make certain
content viral while disregarding other content. In this rearrangement of power dynamics
through the workings of its algorithm, the platform becomes the “supra-gatekeeper” – i.e., the
ultimate entity, which decides which content should be shown to the users (Vázquez-Herrero
et al., 2021, pp. 13–14).

These examples demonstrate that content analysis is a useful research strategy that allows
studying different features of the platform and their social, cultural, and political
ramifications. There are several reasons for that. First, the platform generates abundant
content that can be viewed, collected, and analyzed without logging in. Second, as an
unobtrusive research strategy, the analysis of TikTok’s content (videos, likes, comments, etc.)
can be an efficient way to capture and observe participants’ interactions without interference
from the researcher. Finally, this method allows for a systematic comparison between
different organizations, groups, and other entities.

4.3 Mixed methods studies

Finally, there is a small but growing number of studies that combine different research
strategies to examine the dynamics of the platform as well as its individual and group-level
effects (Klug et al., 2021; Literat & Kligler-Vilenchik, 2021; Medina Serrano et al., 2020;
Mittmann et al., 2021; Seegers, 2020). The fact that these studies can approach a specific
research question from more than one methodological perspective distinguishes this group of
studies in contemporary TikTok scholarship.

For example, Daniel Klug and colleagues (2021) set to examine how users perceived the
workings of the TikTok algorithm, how this perception affected the ways they created and
disseminated content, and to what extent did users’ perceptions about the functioning of the
platform’s algorithm correspond to reality (p. 85). To accomplish this ambitious task, the
researchers used both qualitative and quantitative methods. First, they conducted a series of
qualitative semi-structured interviews to understand users’ assumptions about the platform.
Second, they conducted a quantitative analysis of over 300,000 videos posted on the
platform. Their results reveal that there is a discrepancy between users’ perceptions about the
functioning of the algorithm and the way it actually works. For example, while users
perceived hashtags as a useful method of making their content more popular, the statistical
analysis did not support that common assumption. This study is an excellent example of how
a mixed-methods approach can be effectively used to examine the juxtapositions between, on
the one hand, how users perceive a social media platform and its features, and, on the other
hand, how it actually operates. The combination of qualitative and quantitative elements can
be a useful tool for researchers in the fields of communication studies, STS, and digital
sociology.

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Another insightful example of the mixed-methods approach comes from the work of Juan
Carlos Medina Serrano and colleagues (2020). The researchers used a combination of several
research techniques to examine political communication on TikTok. Specifically, they
collected over 3,000 videos that contained #republican and #democrat hashtags and manually
labelled the political affiliation and other characteristics of this visual content. They then used
various computational tools to extract textual, audio, and visual elements from the videos.
And, finally, they performed a statistical analysis of the data.

The results of this study show that TikTok fosters a fundamentally new form of political
communication. Namely, the platform provides a unique digital environment where users are
encouraged to actively interact with the content. As the researchers argue: “TikTok users do
not just merely circulate content and comment on it; they become the content” (Medina
Serrano et al., 2020, p. 8). This interaction, in turn, fosters a deeply immersive experience
that shapes how users are engaged in political discourse online. The researchers conclude that
“TikTok can potentially redefine political communication as a new public arena for civic
discourse. While other social media platforms are highly dependent on the friend structure
and can thus foster echo chambers, TikTok’s open structure may allow a more cross-partisan
dialogue” (Medina Serrano et al., 2020, p. 8). This study shows that TikTok is an excellent
research site for the study of new forms of political communication. It provides a wide range
of opportunities to examine how platform affordances affect how users create, experience,
and reimagine audiovisual content.

As these studies show, there is great potential in combining both qualitative and quantitative
methods to research the unique media environment of TikTok. It is evident from these
examples that this environment not only changes how users interact with content but also
affects how they think about art, politics, culture, and entertainment. Mixed methods studies
are uniquely suited to capture the different levels of the platform’s effects.

5. Future directions
It is clear from the above discussion that TikTok scholarship is only in the early phases of its
formation. Nevertheless, it has already been demonstrated that the platform is a rich site for
studying global youth culture. Moreover, it constitutes a genuinely new type of social media
environment that is actively reshaping the ways millions of people engage in social, cultural,
and political activities.

In this last section of the chapter, I will briefly sketch a few potential directions for the future
of TikTok studies before offering a conclusion.

5.1 Social network analysis

The first potential direction in TikTok research is social network analysis or SNA in short
(see Scott, 1988). This method has been used to answer a broad range of questions about
social media use and has proven to be an effective quantitative research approach in digital
media studies. For example, Ediger et al. (2010) used GraphCT, a Graph Characterization
Toolkit, to analyze the way users interact on Twitter. In another study, Grandjean (2016) used
SNA to map the digital humanities community on Twitter and understand how members of
this scholarly group interacted with one another. Peeters (2019) used SNA to analyze how
learners of English as a second language developed their peer network on Facebook.

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Similarly, Stepanyan and colleagues (2010) applied the SNA to look at how students
interacted on Twitter.

Given how effective this method has been on different platforms, it appears that SNA may be
highly useful for exploring TikTok and its social effects. For example, SNA can contribute
with a systematic analysis of patterns of users’ interaction on the platform. It can also be
useful in showing the ways specific communities or subcultures- represented by clusters of
users - emerge and maintain themselves on the platform. Finally, it can help to identify the
predictors of users’ engagement with specific topics, personalities, or types of content.
Unfortunately, the development of this approach is currently curbed by the fact that the
company prohibits the use of automated scripts for data collection.

5.2 Digital ethnography

The second direction, namely digital ethnography (see Murthy, 2008), has already proven
itself an indispensable research strategy for understanding how individuals and groups
experience social media use. This method has been applied to a broad range of questions. For
instance, Talip et al. (2016) conducted an ethnographic study of how users share information
on Twitter and the ways the platform is used as an information ground. Chretien et al. (2015)
applied the same method to understand how medical students use Twitter for expanding their
professional network.

Communication researcher Andreas Schellewald (2021) conducted one of the first digital
ethnographies in TikTok studies. The main objective of this study was to examine how users
interacted with the “For You” page on the platform. After six months of fieldwork,
Schellewald was able to differentiate between several overlapping yet distinct communicative
practices on the platform: comedic, communal, explanatory, and others. In conclusion,
Schellewald (2021) notes that TikTok “takes shape as a dynamic structure that is open toward
being appropriated and navigated in different ways and in negotiation of potential
consequences” (p. 1451). This finding highlights the importance of using an immersive
research strategy, such as digital ethnography, that allows for an in-depth and comprehensive
exploration of this dynamic and interactive social media site. This approach can be useful for
qualitative scholars who are interested in understanding how users experience the platform
and how these experiences shape their interactions on TikTok.

5.3 Longitudinal studies

The third and final direction is longitudinal research.

In this chapter, I discussed a diverse range of studies that focused on different topics and
utilized a variety of qualitative and quantitative approaches. Yet, all these studies relied on
the data collected at a specific point in time and, thus, they presented a “snapshot” of a
particular situation. Longitudinal studies (see Fitzmaurice et al., 2008; Menard, 2002) that
rely on repeated observations of individuals, groups, and/or social patterns allow for a
nuanced analysis of dynamic social processes and changes over time.

Different types of longitudinal designs have been used in digital media studies to answer a
variety of questions. For example, Dumas et al. (2020) conducted a longitudinal study to
examine the relationship between the strategies young adults use to attract more “likes” on
Instagram and their personal well-being. In another study, Larsson (2021) examined the
interaction between political parties and citizens on Instagram to understand the changes in

PREPRINT: Alex Miltsov Researching TikTok: Themes, Methods, and Future Directions 10
how political parties communicated on the platform. Skowronski et al. (2021) applied
longitudinal design to reveal the patterns of adolescent sexualization and self-objectification,
which resulted from the video game and Instagram use.

Given the fact that TikTok is a dynamic and rapidly developing digital media environment, it
is important to include “change over time” as a variable. In this context, longitudinal studies
will be indispensable in tracing a variety of patterns and changes on the platform. For
example, longitudinal research can help with analyzing users’ engagement and
disengagement with different types of content over time. It can also illustrate how new or
modified features and platform affordances affect how users engage in content creation
practices. Finally, repeated observations can help understand the phenomenon of viral content
and its changing meaning and influence over time.

6. Conclusion
This chapter aimed to offer a comprehensive review of current scholarship on TikTok. It is
evident from this review that TikTok studies have not yet established conceptual or
methodological traditions and that these traditions are only at the beginning of their
formation. At the same time, it is clear that the platform is quickly becoming an important
site for scientific research. Today, TikTok is an important global force that increasingly
shapes the ways young people socialize, experience social and political ideas, and engage in
online communication. The combination of specific features, the dominance of sounds over
images and videos, and the emphasis on viral content – all these elements combined have
created a unique media environment with far-reaching social, cultural, political, and
economic consequences. Whether by adapting already available research methods or by
creating new ways of exploring the platform, TikTok presents a challenging yet exciting
research site for researchers across the world.

PREPRINT: Alex Miltsov Researching TikTok: Themes, Methods, and Future Directions 11
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